COACH YOU BLOG
What advice would you give to a younger you?
27/11/2012
I was recently asked to write this article for a business publication and it threw up some interesting ideas. Take a look and then perhaps think about your own learning from the last few years.
Letter to Jill McCulloch, age 39, February 2004, just before discovering her path:
You feel pretty confused right now. You don’t know where all the experience you have is going. You’ve done what everyone else wants you to but it’s left you feeling hollow inside. You know you are meant to do something meaningful for people beyond running businesses, sales and marketing, advertising or recruitment. Don’t worry, stop stressing, you haven’t even heard of the career you’re just about to embark upon …
Dad said, “Find a job you love and you’ll never go to work again”. In six weeks you’ll have an epiphany and discover coaching. Having rather typically researched the marketplace for the best possible coach training course in the world, you resign your Directorship, sign up with a coach and work your three months’ notice. Coaching changes your life forever. Knowing what will bring you fulfilment makes decision making so much more straightforward. You have balance across your whole life for the first time ever. Most important of all you know what you are meant to do. You coach full-time from the first weekend, your first ever twenty minute “trial client” is still a client and has referred many others.
Your clients will do extraordinary things, things they suspected they may be capable of but never dared … set up successful businesses, charities and Community Interest Companies. They will marry, emigrate, leave the rat race, embrace the rat race, find themselves, find their true love and find their place in life. I know you feel like you want to escape from business right now but it’s in your blood … you’ve a natural flair for sales and marketing which you’ll go on to get a post-graduate qualification in (yes, really, whilst working six days a week, with a husband and three children). Your clients who run their own businesses will love your insight and your enthusiasm for them finding their own unique marketing system that gives them the business and life balance they crave. Whatever they come into coaching for, the self-knowledge and skills they learn are invaluable across their whole lives.
The biggest challenge will be a combination of losing many people special to your life, hitting hormones and global recession. Take the learning from all the people you lose and build that wisdom into your coaching. Remember your clients will need you more than ever in a recession – to get beyond the fear, to focus, to push forward and hold their position, ready to make the most of the growth when it comes. In fact, make sure you read your testimonials often, just to remind you!
There will be many moments of joy and success … setting so many people on new paths with the resultant gratitude, raising £25,000 for Teenage Cancer Trust and being invited to clients’ business launches, charity receptions, weddings … The moment that stands out most will be a patient lady who stands waiting for you to finish a discussion with your neighbour at a networking lunch. You rise from the table and confirm your identity to her at which point she throws her arms around you and says “thank you so much, you are coaching my husband and it has changed both our lives”. That will lift your self-belief and confirm that all the hours of training, practice, dedication and investment are worth it.
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